A measure aimed at boosting female employment in the workforce may actually be making it worse, a major study has found.

Leaders of the Australian public service will today be told to “hit pause” on blind recruitment trials, which many believed would increase the number of women in senior positions.

Blind recruitment means recruiters cannot tell the gender of candidates because those details are removed from applications. It is seen as an alternative to gender quotas and has also been embraced by Deloitte, Ernst & Young, Victoria Police and Westpac Bank.

In a bid to eliminate sexism, thousands of public servants have been told to pick recruits who have had all mention of their gender and ethnic background stripped from their CVs.

The assumption behind the trial is that management will hire more women when they can only consider the professional merits of candidates. …

Professor Michael Hiscox, a Harvard academic who oversaw the trial, said he was shocked by the results and has urged caution.

“We anticipated this would have a positive impact on diversity — making it more likely that female candidates and those from ethnic minorities are selected for the shortlist,” he said.

Hiring more females and ethnics is good (“positive”)? So whites and men are bad? Guess that makes it official. And it backfired:

The trial found assigning a male name to a candidate made them 3.2 per cent less likely to get a job interview.

Adding a woman’s name to a CV made the candidate 2.9 per cent more likely to get a foot in the door. …

The measure was aimed at boosting female employment by removing indications of gender from job applications. Professor Michael Hiscox… says results have shown “the opposite” and is urging caution.

So when only merit was considered, men did better? The obvious conclusion is of course not drawn by the ABC or Professor Hiscox. At least they are still trying to involve merit, rather than overtly going down the sexist route of simply applying quotas.

Men continue to outnumber women at senior ranks of the public service, despite vastly outnumbering men at the rank-and-file level.

“There has been a lot of effort made to improving diversity in the public servants and the subjects of our trial were fairly senior,” Professor Hiscox said.

What victims of ideology they are over there at the ABC — perhaps the propagandists lost sight of the fact that PC is a set of false ideas that are adopted for political reasons. The idea that the populations of woman and men are equally able is PC, but not true, just as their heights are not the same.

Trigger warning: Here is some completely blasphemous data — some facts are just not allowed down at the ABC and in the Australian Public service, and don’t tell Professor Hiscox or you will be shouted at and harangued to within an inch of your life:

The distribution of g [raw intelligence] in male and female populations. The scale of the horizontal axis is in units of the male standard deviation.

The distributions look about the same, but if you inspect closely you find that only 37% of humans with IQs over 120 (the bottom of managerial level) are female. So when feminists claim that 50% of managerial jobs should be theirs, they are scientifically incorrect. And as the threshold IQ moves up (as it would for senior public service positions), the male-female numbers gap only grows larger.

The only solution in line with PC assumptions is is to dumb down the senior public service, just like they have the universities, schools, fire officers, armed forces, …. The standard solution throughout the PC West when white men dominate on merit has been to dilute the effect of merit down and down until ideological outcomes are achieved. Then they wonder why nobody seems to be as competent as they used to be.